Prosecutors in Taiwan have charged a 38-person ring that dumped construction waste across five Hsinchu County townships under the cover of "land leveling," making over NT$100 million in illegal profits — bad news for the landowners and communities left with ruined hillsides.

• The group ran a full operation: finding sites, collecting soil, arranging trucks, guarding the dump sites and burying waste with excavators.
• Sites in Beipu, Xinpu, Baoshan, Guanxi and Qionglin were filled with broken concrete, bricks, plastic, glass, tiles and scrap metal, some pits over ten meters deep.
• The Guanxi site alone took more than a hundred truckloads onto protected hillside land, washing away soil and blocking a creek's drainage.
• Some landowners knowingly rented out farm and hillside land and charged by the truckload; others were recruited through a gardening group on Facebook advertising for "fill dirt."
• Police detained 31 people, searched 13 locations and seized cash, a plot of land and a house; seven defendants are being held.

Outlook: Prosecutors say they will keep tracing the money behind these schemes and are asking residents to report unexplained truckloads of soil moving onto farmland or hillsides.